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Computer scientists and statisticians at Carnegie Mellon University are using both artificial intelligence and the wisdom of crowds to guide their efforts in forecasting 2016-2017 flu activity. Past experience suggests it remains an open question as to which is better at predicting the disease's spread week by week.The Delphi research group, uniting faculty and students from CMU's machine learning, statistics, computer science and computational biology departments, is part of a research initiative with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop methods of accurately...

Three School of Computer Science faculty members — Justine Cassell, Manuela Veloso and Todd Mowry — have been named Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellows for 2016 in recognition of their contributions to human-computer interaction, computer architecture and artificial intelligence, respectively. They are among 53 members of the ACM, the world's leading computing society, elevated to fellow status this year."As nearly 100,000 computing professionals are members of our association, to be selected to join the top one percent is truly an honor," said Vicki L. Hanson, ACM...

Bhiksha Raj, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute, has been named to the 2017 class of IEEE fellows for his "contributions to speech recognition," according to IEEE.Established more than a hundred years ago, the IEEE fellow grade is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the organization's fields of interest are deemed fitting of this grade elevation. The total number of fellows selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting IEEE membership.Raj, who...

Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, told the U.S. Senate today that the nation should be preparing a million of today's high school students to join a growing artificial intelligence industry.In testimony before the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Moore said that such dramatic increases in the number of AI experts will be essential to meet the growing demands of industry and to maintain global competitiveness."Based upon my experience, a computer science grad with...

For the second consecutive year, Carnegie Mellon came out on top in the LiveQA evaluation — an exercise that requires question-answering (QA) software to respond to real-time questions received by the Yahoo! Answers website — at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2016).A system designed by Di Wang, a Language Technologies Institute Ph.D. student and member of Professor Eric Nyberg's Open Advancement of Question Answering (OAQA) research group, out-paced competitors in answering user-generated questions in real time.The questions, ranging from the mundane to the perplexing (e.g., "How do I...

People love to take selfies, but it's a love that can prove fatal. A growing number of people die each year while snapping photos of themselves on cliffs, on railroad tracks and other hazardous spots. Researchers in Pittsburgh and in India are looking for ways to reduce this risk.In a new study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi (IIITD) scoured public records to compile a list of 127 deaths associated with selfies worldwide between March 2014 and September 2016. After analyzing those selfie deaths, they designed a...

Facebook has agreed to acquire Faciometrics, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute that develops facial analysis software for mobile applications. "Now, we’re taking a big step forward by joining the team at Facebook, where we’ll be able to advance our work at an incredible scale, reaching people from across the globe," said Fernando De la Torre, associate research professor of robotics and head of the Human Sensing Laboratory.Facial analysis tools have many applications including in animation and virtual/augmented reality. At CMU, De la Torre and his colleagues...

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have spent years inventing and perfecting a platform that uses workstations, distributed computers, mobile devices or embedded devices to solve large machine learning problems efficiently and effectively, and have now spun off a company, Petuum Inc., to make those capabilities available commercially.Eric Xing, a professor in the Machine Learning Department and founder and CEO of the company, said the company has already obtained $15 million in initial venture capital funding and expects to have its first products on the market early next year...

The world premiere of "La Mare dels Peixos"(Mother Fish), a one-act opera co-written by Roger Dannenberg, professor of computer science, and Jorge Sastre, professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and former visiting researcher at CMU, will be held Friday, Dec. 16, in Valencia, Spain. The opera, based on an old Valencian folktale about how a magical fish changes a family's fortunes, includes computer and electronic elements. Dannenberg, whose research focuses on computer music, hopes to arrange a... MORE »

12.06.16 --

Howie Choset, professor of robotics, and Manuela Veloso, head of the Machine Learning Department, are two of eight founding editorial board members of Science Robotics, the latest member of the Science family of journals. The journal's inaugural issue, published Dec. 6, included a review article on bio-inspired robots written by Matt Travers, systems scientist in the Robotics Institute, and Choset. Science Robotics will promote the... MORE »

11.15.16 --

The Verge technology and culture site is celebrating its fifth anniversary in November by looking at what's in store for the next five years, based on interviews with opinion leaders, such as Manuela Veloso, head of SCS's Machine Learning Department. Read Veloso's "The Verge 2021" interview and watch the accompanying video to get her insights on why humanity and artificial intelligence will be inseparable.